Large organizations, such as commercial organizations, financial institutions, government agencies or public safety organizations conduct numerous interactions with customers, users, suppliers and the like on a daily basis. Many of these interactions are vocal, or at least comprise a vocal or audio component, for example, voices of parties to a phone call or the audio portion of a video or face-to-face interaction. A significant part of these interactions takes place between a customer and a representative of the organization, e.g., an agent in a contact center.
Various prior art systems and methods enable recording or otherwise capturing an audio portion of an interaction and, at a later stage (namely, in off-line mode) process captured portions. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,716,048 ('048) discloses a method of segmenting an audio interaction by associating anchor segments with parties to an interaction and associating additional segments the parties based on anchor segments.
As disclosed by the '048 patent, in order to select an anchor segment, segment a recorded interaction and associating segments with parties to an interaction, the interaction must first be recorded and the recorded interaction must be available to the segmentation process. Accordingly, prior art segmentation systems and methods are unsuitable for real-time speaker segmentation of audio interactions.
It will be appreciated that for simplicity and clarity of illustration, elements shown in the figures have not necessarily been drawn accurately or to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements may be exaggerated relative to other elements for clarity, or several physical components may be included in one functional block or element. Further, where considered appropriate, reference numerals may be repeated among the figures to indicate corresponding or analogous elements.